TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

an example of those studies where Benjamin silently overlooks the generic titles of
tragedy and trauerspiel) argued in ―Die Aller Edelste Belustigung Kunst-und
Tugendliebender Gemühter (Frankfurt 1666): ―[w]hoever will write tragedies must be
excellently well-versed in chronicles and history books, both ancient and modern, he
must know thoroughly the affairs of the world and the state, in which politics truly
consist‖ (my emphasis 63). Trauerspiel grapples with the incidental details – the sighs
and moans that really govern political action – upon which general histories of cause and
effect rest.
The signal truth, for Benjamin, that the things of history were the substance that
informed the content of the trauerspiel lay in the fact that the trauerspiel had traditionally
been a form reserved solely for princes to write. The Prince‘s position, as the only
autonomous social agent that could effect political change, intrigued Benjamin, who had
the temerity to seek in the conditions that underpin particular kinds of aesthetic
production an explanation for why kings felt themselves to be autonomous writers of
history. He did this by using examples of Royal forays into dramatic writing that he
determined were precursors to ―trauerspiel-writing.‖ These included Julius Caesar‘s
Oedipus, August‘s Achilles and Ajax, and Maecenas‘ Prometheus. It was, Benjamin
argued, these princes‘ exposure to the mythical elements within the subject matter of the
plays that they were concerned enough to rewrite that contributed to the making of their
own biographies, their own fate, entirely different objects. That is, these writer-princes
become knowable as figures in the bastard-genealogy of trauerspiel that Benjamin
describes because of their enlightened aesthetic apprehension of the mythological falsities
and the ―family of heroes‖ trope upon which kingship rested. Shakespeare‘s ―Julius
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